Coordination: The Role of Syntactic, Pragmatic and Processing Factors in Its First Language Acquisition. Papers and Reports on Child Language Development, Number 19.

Lust, Barbara; And Others

This review of research into the acquisition of grammatical coordination (i.e., the use of conjunctions) pulls together both English language and cross-linguistic data. Although the importance of pragmatic factors in language acquisition is not denied, the data make it clear that grammatical factors seem to play a significant role in the acquisition of coordination, and that pragmatic factors, if claimed to be independent of these grammatical factors, do not provide a viable alternative to either description or explanation of the acquisition of complex syntax such as coordination. (Author/JB)